Appcelerator Blog

The Leading Resource for All Things Mobile

UPDATE (Monday 10:42 PM PST): Unfortunately, during this evening’s testing we found a rendering bug on Table View with auto heights. We’re working on a fix and hope to have it fixed before the morning. As soon as we fix this issue and can do another round of testing, we’ll have the release up. Stay tuned to the blog for updates. Sorry for the delay!

For the past 4 weeks we’ve been working very hard and fast on 1.4 and we’ve made a ton of great fixes and improvements. We’ve already resolved several hundred issues and have a number of issues we’re trying to complete before the release.

We need your help.

In 1.3, we encountered a number of regression issues and unexpected problems — a number of them that we flat out should have caught in final testing. However, a significant number of them we’ve found are simply issues we just didn’t expect or didn’t have good test coverage for. As the community and number of apps have skyrocketed over the past few months, so has the impact on the platform and our ability to support you. We’re working as fast as we can (some of us, 7 days per week) and hiring as fast as we can. We thank everyone that continues to help out in Q&A, helping us find and reproduce weird issues and working with us with patience and grace as we try and help you with your problems. We also really appreciate when you say “thank you” and tell us how much you appreciate what we’re doing.

Going forward, there’s a few things that we’re doing on a Quality front that I’d like to outline here and to ask for your help:

1. First and foremost, we’re adding full-time QA engineering. Up until recently, we had formal QA but it was done as a part-time activity by several of us near the end of a release cycle. I’m proud to announce we’ve recently hired our first full-time QA engineer that will simply do nothing but test, build tests, run more tests and work with you to get your issues so we can build more tests. Every…single…day. Proactively, as it should be done.

2. We’re working on several fronts around automated testing both for the platform itself but also something that would be useful to you – as you test your own apps. This is going to take some time to work through and we’ll do it like we do everything else, in a number of iterations. The first iteration is that with 1.4 we’re going to be introducing a new command line tool that will allow you to do some of the common tasks in Titanium Developer from the command line. For example, you can build your entire project and even run your app from command line. This will serve many different use cases – but one of the major ones is automated build and unit testing.

3. We’re going to start pre-releasing updates before they’re pushed automatically to the community-at-large. We’re going to make this something that’s more automated once the new Titanium Developer comes out – much like you can do with Chrome today. We’ll use a streams concept – something we already have in place in our infrastructure – to allow you to switch to more stable or less stable release streams automatically. For now, however, we’re going to manually push the SDK for download as a candidate release. Once we’ve completed our full round of regression and gotten sufficient feedback from the community, we’ll then push to everyone through the normal release channel. Our hope is that one of the ways you can help us help you is that you’ll download and test the candidate build(s) on your apps before we push them as final.

4. Documentation and Training. We’ve been investing heavily in training and documentation and you’ll see more content and announcements around that soon. Additionally, we’re in the process of producing a ton more written documentation, tutorials and more complete documentation sets and you will see a lot more of this over the next 4-6 weeks. In addition, as you’ve seen, we’re blogging several times a week more complete examples and tutorials here. Training and Documentation are things you’ve asked us to provide you more of – and we’re fulfilling on that promise as quickly as possible. Also, we have an upcoming San Jose Titanium training on June 26-27th.

Of course, there’s a lot more things we’ve got on the drawing board I’ll share over the next couple of weeks and months.

OK, back to 1.4.

Now that you have some context, let me tell you our plan for 1.4.

We’re going to release the 1.4 release candidate on Monday, June 21st. We’ll make the announcement here – most likely late in the afternoon West Coast time (PST) with instructions on how to download and how to report any issues you might find. We’ll also tell you what’s fixed and what we’re trying to finalize. I can tell you now that we’re wrestling with a few iOS 4.0 issues and we want to test on the new 4.0 device before we ship. Depending on how things play out, our goal would be to get you the release, get your feedback and turn around any blocking issues before June 28th for the officially targeted release. However, that date will largely depend on what we hear from you.

47 Comments

Congratulations in advance for reaching up to the 1.4 milestone. I’m in love with what you’re doing.
As for the documentation is concerned, a humble suggestion of mine would be to setup wiki editable by community members.

I hope toe experiment with web databases on top of titanium to store the data locally and submit to the server periodically to reduce the load and also to cater for low connectivity web apps.

I will contribute my experimentation in form of tutorial. Hopefully I will be doing it this weekend.

great News so far. Most interesting for me was the point about command line tools for testing/running/packaging projects. But what about your current python scripts used unter hood by Titanium Developer? I’m already satisfied by their functionality. To get more into detail: I’m working on a python library that automates/simplyfies run/test/packaing tasks and plan to put a Textmate bundle (maybe merging with subtleGradient’s one in the near future) on top on it.

Could you please give me some further infos about this update issue, because when you replace your current build scripts I could save my time and just wait till you release Ti 1.4. Just drop me some lines via email.

Hey Peter – the new titanium.py simply wraps the existing builder.py and others to make it more user friendly. The existing scripts are really meant more for tools than humans and titanium.py simply tries to make things that builder.py require now as input, something that can be calculated from the project instead. So, if you’re using the existing scripts fine, they’ll continue to work.

I too am looking forward to the command-line tools. For those of us used to developing in Java for Android, we’re already using eclipse, which means…we’ll be able to build/run our Titanium projects without even leaving eclipse! I know it’s a small thing, but having to switch from eclipse to Titanium Developer just to build gets annoying after the first 100 times (now we’ll just have to switch between our IDE and the emulator).

Fantastic news. I don’t, unfortunately, get to spend all my days programming with Titanium. But when I’m able to sneak in a few hours it becomes increasingly more enjoyable and the depth of the platform continues to impress. Any good product development team is intently aware of their own deficiencies and it’s great that you’re aware of the need for better documentation, more robust testing and better tools. Sharing your plans with us is very helpful and with Apple’s recent re-adjustments to their terms suggests, at least to me, that the Titanium platform for mobile development will continue to grown in value and importance. Thanks for building such a easy-to-learn and use product.

peter

Posted June 17, 2010 @ 11:52 am

@Max: Usually Eclipse is my IDE of choice too, and the first thing I’ve done when I started with Titanium was to setup an External Tools Configuratioin that builds my projects automatically right from inside Eclipse. Have a look at this post and see how simple it is: http://bit.ly/aMSDH3

John

Posted June 17, 2010 @ 2:08 pm

Will 1.4 fix the SDK 4 build issue? Currently don’t use Titanium at all, because nothing will build, despite applying the patch that was blogged about recently.

As soon as commandline building is possible, I’ll update the Titanium Mobile TextMate Bundle with Build & Run commands.

I’ve actually tried implementing it already using the existing scripts. Having a nice simple cli script will be absolutely huge!

I hope you guys release an updated API.json file too. Then I’ll update all the codecompletion stuff. I’ll even flag all the new 1.4 apis!

William Xue

Posted June 17, 2010 @ 4:33 pm

Great work guys. thumb up for the release candidate approach.

Pepe Le Pew

Posted June 17, 2010 @ 6:11 pm

I can’t help but feel that Apple will eventually shut Titanium out. When Titanium issues crop up between iOS releases or between iPhone and iPad platforms and developers are forced to rebuild their apps with a Titanium SDK update or manual workarounds to fix these issues, I’m sure this is *exactly* the kind of shit Apple doesn’t want.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Titanium…I’ve got 3 Titanium-built apps published so far with a 4th one coming soon…but I’m very much afraid Titanium days are coming to an end unless these serious breakage issue between iOS releases and between platforms aren’t resolved for good.

I’d like to one day be able to just leave an app alone and not have to rebuild it every month just to make sure it won’t break on future iOS updates. Developers using Apple’s SDK don’t need to rebuild all the time…I’m hoping that day will come to Titanium users.

It’s tough to explain to customers why your app works well on an iPhone but why it crashes instantly at launch on an iPad. You simply can’t tell them “well, I’m using Titanium to build my apps”…they simply won’t understand what that means, they’ll keep blaming you for problems that are out of your control…and you’re outing your app as being built using Titanium (which, IMO, isn’t so wise at the moment.)

Pepe – just so you know, iOS native developers are having to do some of the same thing. Even Apple’s on App Store app crashes (before an update) on iOS 4. All the crap we’re going through the re-tool for iOS4 other devs will have to go through too.

Pepe Le Pew

Posted June 17, 2010 @ 6:13 pm

That said…thank you. I do feel like you guys are working hard, despite the numerous problems and frustrations I’ve encountered.

Like I said, I love Titanium. There’s no way I would have been capable of developing 3 apps (and a 4th one) in 3 months had I been using any other SDK.

John, Ti 1.3 patched is running fine on os4. We already built apps on Apple Store with this patch.

Can we expect to see speed improvement in the 1.4?

John

Posted June 19, 2010 @ 12:32 pm

@jeff haynie – what a crap response!

sj101

Posted June 20, 2010 @ 9:45 pm

@jeff Not trying to call you out or anything but on my 4.0 beta, every other app i have tried has worked without a crash, there is no way they all recompiled for 4.0 already. For example: MonoTouch apps work fine with 4.0. PhoneGap apps works fine. Maybe they took precaution and applied these patch in their earlier version?

Having said that, I have no problem with recompiling but it kind of sucks for other developers who have yet to discover that their app will crash once 4.0 is out. Even worse for those who created their app pre-1.0 and would have to recode it in 1.0+.

Dont get me wrong here, I think you guys are doing an awesome job and I don’t think there’s anyone out there that could do a better job but still these are some of the issues that needs to be addressed to max.

Keep up the good work!

John Lullie

Posted June 21, 2010 @ 7:29 am

Thanks Jeff.
Your team is awesome! Looking forward to the update!

Pepe Le Pew

Posted June 21, 2010 @ 11:06 am

Jeff, Appcelerator is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. All my Titanium apps do *not* work under iOS4 after the update. I don’t know what kind of trickery allowed the apps to work on the emulator but this is going to hurt…it’s going to hurt me, it’s going to hurt your supposed 50k developers, and it’s going to hurt you and Appcelerator as Apple will probably start weeding out apps built with Titanium.

I simply don’t know what to do anymore. I’m waiting for Titanium 1.4 in hopes that it will compile something that works under iOS4 but I have no idea how I’m going to explain this to the people that bought my app.

I’ll have to suffer through 2 weeks or more of people telling me my apps crash on launch. Jeff…this is a catastrophe.

@Pepe – if you’ve applied it correctly, it shouldn’t be crashing because of ios4. You might have some other problem not related. however, it’s impossible without knowing any details. If you’re like to upgrade to premium, we can provide advanced support. Otherwise, the 1.4 RC will be out later this evening and you can try it with this release. We have many apps tested on device under ios4 now with no problem.

hello,
i also was sadly hit with some iOS related problems. and yes, i used the iOS4 patch that was put out a month ago. first problem – my own app that i downloaded through itunes would crash on launch. in a panic, i thought it was an old development version. so, i deleted it. then, downloaded it again via itunes. now it launches fine. i hope that only happens on my phone, and not some customers. i do clearly remember downloading it fresh from itunes when it came out, just to have the proud experience. so, i am 99% sure the first crashing app was my released version.

however, now, images for custom table views become randomly stretched horizontally. and, it really is random. and, then they randomly stop being stretched. i have another unreleased app that is exhibiting the same thing. also, when this happens, suddenly standard tableview cell lines appear.

i hope the 1.4RC fixes it. fingers crossed. get that puppy out asap! i already pulled all the ads i had out on my app, just as a bit of momentum was going

Pepe Le Pew

Posted June 21, 2010 @ 12:42 pm

Jeff, come on…it was a simple drag and drop operation of a file called libTiCore.a with the optional step of backing up the original libTiCore.a file. How the heck can I apply it incorrectly?

Thanks for the update, I’m happy to help you test when it is available! I haven’t been plagued with any crashing problems yet, and the one build problem that I had was quickly resolved via Q&A, so thanks so far!

i am sure the appcelerator guys are in a mad frenzy of testing and tweaking. technically, i think it’s still “cutting it close” time if they get it out now, so probably not going to get a comment update until it is out, or until it is “umm… missed our goal, but still mad at work” time.

the main challenge after is apple’s review process. i am sure there are other developers, even non-titanium ones, who had a few random glitches pop up that will also be re-submitting.

as an update – my only problem seems to be the grouped table bug. so, umm…. if this is fixed already, please feel free to push out 1.4RC1 as is

i would much rather change my app description to say “i know there is a bug, and the fixed has been submitted” rather than “don’t download my app, cause there is a bug right now”

fingers crossed!!

Sj101

Posted June 21, 2010 @ 6:45 pm

Pepe, calm down bro. I’m sure they’re working their ass off to get it out. I much rather have a working version than have a premature version.

On the side note, I have also experienced the tableview issue while I was testing under 4.0. Randomly when I go back to the screen with a table, the table’s round corners will disappear and they would appear as normal style free tables. I saw no pattern to this, it was very random. I don’t have 4.0 anymore because I had to submit an app so had to roll back once my iPhone4 comes in couple of days, I will get you guys the console log from Dashcode of when this tableview issue occurs. It might have been an issue with apple’s sdk but we’ll see.

to all those in anger mode (i was, too – it’s natural) – the plus is, there is NO ONE more vested in making sure apps are bug free then the titanium developers themselves. sure i have an app on the line, but they have their whole fully invested software venture here. so, no one better to be on top of this then them!

and, for me – i wouldn’t even have attempted this app to begin with if it wasn’t for titanium. i certainly prefer having an app with a small glitch to patch up, rather than no potential to have an app at all.